I shared the sentiment: Skate World, the roller skating rink of my youth, after almost 40 years of operation in nearby Springfield, Ore., was going to close, and a patch of the quilt of my childhood was being shorn into tatters.

But the demolition of this repository of youthful memories should not have surprised me. For decades, roller skating rinks have fought for their survival, and over the past five years, participation in roller skating is down about 4 percent, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association.

Nostalgia can be a tricky, fickle bedfellow, but there did seem to be the threat of the loss of a sense of shared, cordial space, particularly in communities that were physically spread out. As Robert Putnam noted in his 2000 book “Bowling Alone” — before the smartphone and social media era — our bridge clubs, civic groups, square dances and the like have long been a melting iceberg. Skate World felt like a giant chunk falling off.

Skate World, sandwiched between Interstate 5 and the backside of Gateway Mall, carved out an unlikely sanctuary in the hearts of locals as a place for birthday parties, school field trips and other childhood loitering. It bore an ominous sign at entry, creating a crucial air of mystery and danger: “Skate at Your Own Risk.”

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Girls lacing up their skates at the roller rink.CreditAmanda Lucier for The New York Times

That was the motto our family lived by. We had a couple of roller-related hospital trips, one on Skate World’s floors: My mother fell while sailing across its floors and broke her arm shortly after I was born, a testament to the bizarre stoicism of her desire to chase her trip to the maternity ward with a few laps. We weren’t a graceful people, but Skate World welcomed us nonetheless, and politely asked if we’d like to add wrist guards to our skate rentals.

Many a crush was nursed within those carpeted walls, where kitschy pop and disco songs were requested one-by-one on steady rotation, the smell of stale nachos and body odor permeated the air, and beige skates were rented out with questionable aromas of their own. I was an ambidextrous child, and the symmetry of roller skating was a welcome respite from my awkwardness with physical activities that involved a ball or a racket.

For a small fee, paid in loose change and crumpled dollar bills, carnations could be dedicated to those circulating on the baby blue floor, eliciting a round of giggles or groans. Chewing gum and “foul language” were supposedly banned; I can now come clean about dropping obscenity bombs in a rebellious preadolescent fervor and sneaking in Bubble Yum on multiple occasions. In a mud hole of constant drizzle, skating was a welcome activity for cooped-up children and their exhausted parents, a more kid-friendly bowling alley. As a community gathering spot, the rink felt less classist than a shopping mall but less intimidating than a church, and much less soggy than a park.

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Skaters during open skate at Skate World in Springfield, Ore.CreditAmanda Lucier for The New York Times

It was perfect.

Amid my grief over its closing, I began to wonder about the decline of roller skating, particularly in communities like Lane County that encompass an array of lifestyles: farmland, frat houses, weed dispensaries and evangelical churches, with a few rodeos and communes tossed in for good measure. Roller skating was an inherently communal pastime, and screen-free, and it was hard not to think of Skate World as a spoke in a wheel of the neighborhood. The local minor league baseball stadium and my childhood bowling alley each burning to the ground in recent years didn’t help, either.

I also found myself wondering about the consequences of a beloved shared space closing its doors in this era of great disconnection. Some communities are formed through schools, churches, workplaces. But much of how we learn about one another as a society comes from physically being together in places like skating rinks. Today, we’re more likely to sext than skate, to troll online than to twirl on a floor, to rant on Twitter than dedicate carnations to one another. Social media has created a digital latticework, but it has also, for some, created abusive commenters, silos and validation rather than curiosity.

As a Skate World kid, I don’t think I could have told you, nor did I care, about the political leanings of my classmates or their families. We were bound by something different from the angry Facebook stream we grew up to inhabit: a genuine interest in spending time together.

A few months after I learned of the threat of Skate World’s closing, Donald J. Trump was elected president. It was a stark reminder of how complicated the country really is, let alone our knotty relationship to the idea of how things really used to be. (I’m among those who is still unclear of when exactly the “again” of Trump’s slogan was referring to.) Some 41.1 percent of Oregonians voted for Trump, not enough to help him win the state’s meager seven electoral votes but enough to indicate support for what he represented. Whether it was the election or the skating rink, the message of both transitions was clear: I once dumped allowance money dutifully into Skate World’s air hockey games and nachos, but I’ve lived mostly in New York City in the last decade. I was completely out of touch.

I haven’t skated in years and am fairly certain my neon-pink Rollerblades were liquidated several garage sales ago. I’ve often wondered if the trade-off for growing up in the relative newness and freshness of the West Coast was befuddlement when it comes to historical preservation. We don’t have many old things, and we don’t really know what to do with the few that are around when our default response is to compost or field burn.

On a recent visit home, I asked my 15-year-old nephew if he had been to Skate World in the last couple of years. He shrugged, then told me about the latest video game he was into. Not a scientific sample, but a hard moment to shake.

But later in the year, I got a great surprise: Skate World would be saved.

Dave and Debbie Berg of Puyallup, Wash., secured financing to purchase it from the Sacramento-based trusts that had controlled it. They plan to keep it open.

“It’s good for the community,” Debbie Berg told me. For Berg, the purchase was personal. She worked at the rink from 1978 to 1998, she told me, and has been an impassioned skater since she was 13. “Everyone has fun here. It’s been here for 40 years. I think Bill Cook, who designed it, always wanted to keep it open as a rink. It was his baby.”

Berg said that operating one of the state’s few skating rinks isn’t always easy. Payroll costs are going up, and she will probably have to raise the admission fee to accommodate those staffing costs and renovations.

“But I don’t want to change it a lot,” she said. “Just little tweaks here or there.”

The twists and turns at Skate World have made me wonder if today I am still a small-town skater, a New York City elitist, or maybe something in between.

I’m still figuring that out. But the next time I’m in town, I know that I’ll be grateful for the opportunity to lace up some skates.

For now, at least, it isn’t the end of the world after all.

Mary Pilon, the author of “The Monopolists” and the forthcoming “The Kevin Show,” previously covered sports at The New York Times and business at The Wall Street Journal.